That's right, 25 jobs in the last 15 years. A few friends and I were talking about crappy jobs we've had recently, and I figured it was high time I got this down and really examined my employment history. Gladly the job I have now I like very much. Crissy used to be amazed at the range and variety of positions I've held, and looking over the list, it is pretty impressive--I am proud to say I am self-made and hard-working. So, join me on a jaunt down Employment Memory Lane, won't you...hope you have hiking boots.
1. Corn Detassler--what? Yes. I'm from Illinois. Here's a good description, a la
Bob Wallace's blog:
"Corn has to be detassled so it doesn't pollinate itself. If it does, you get weaker corn that isn't so sweet. The detassling itself consists of walking up and down rows of corn for eight hours a day, doing nothing but popping the tassels out of the corn and dropping them on the ground. If you've ever seen a row of corn, you'll find some of them are half a mile long and five to eight feet tall. Imagine eight hours a day, pop, pop, pop, in the heat and humidity of a Midwestern summer, sweating and sneezing and twitching and getting "corn rash" from brushing against the leaves, for about three weeks." We'd pile on the school bus at the ass-crack of dawn in long sleeve shirts and jeans to sweat buckets all day in the 100 degree summer sun, braving gigantic grasshoppers and an occasional corn smut attack. Sidenote--corn has a fungus on it called corn smut. It looks like green playdough. It is gross when thrown at you. Hey, $6 an hour is a lot when you're in 8th grade.
1. Marina--I worked at a marina on the Mississippi in my hometown when I was 14 with my older sister. This is like a floating gas station attached to a dock. We sold gas and snacks and bait, which meant digging night-crawlers out of a tub of dirt. I learned how to tie good knots to hold boats to the dock.
2. Red Apple--this was around 16 years old, a mom and pop diner run by a dirty Albanian who sexually harrassed his waittresses. Not a fun job, not a good time in my life.
3. Blockbuster--slightly more fun, I got 5 free movies a week. Unfortunately the store was in a horrible part of town and I worked til 11. I shrink-wrapped random objects like staplers and phones when I was bored and worked with an aspiring "actor" named Brandon. I wonder what happened to that guy...
4. Gas station 1 and 2--when I went to Northwestern for college I got a job at 2 of the 4 gas stations in the tiny town. Not at the same time. 1 was when I was a sophomore, the other when I was a senior, and after I returned from a year's stint in Texas. They were across the street from each other, and the radio station that played every night I closed always played NKOTB. I was working at the 2nd one the day the screwed up election results of 2000 came in. I also remember a sunny Sunday afternoon when I spotted about 7 of my male friends flying kites in their underwear in the soccer field across the highway.
5. The Hatchery--1 of the very few restaurants in Orange City run by a guy who was a dead-ringer for Archie Bunker and his wife. It was a tiny joint, and I usually walked with $60 most nights. I walked about 12 blocks from campus to it. Archie was the kind of guy who had no problem asking people to move to another table if he needed to push some together. There was a bartender who would smoke at the bar and I swear, she'd not exhale any smoke. It's like it just stayed in her wrinkly little body.
6. VIP Steakhouse--a "sports bar"/restaurant about 9 miles away in Sioux Center, Iowa, run by an angry Vietnamese man I could never understand who yelled a lot. Also about $60 a night. There would be a regular crowd of Nascar fans who'd show up with their gear on and pretend they were watching a real sport with athletes.
7. Product spokesperson--yeah. When I got sick of Iowa and moved to Arlington, Texas, one of the jobs I held simultaneously while also going to school was being one of those sample people you see in supermarkets. You get paid $10 an hour but it's the most mind-numbingly boring and demeaning jobs available. I hawked hair products and Swiffer. Quite often I'd smile my prettiest smile to the manager on duty and give a convincing excuse, and leave early.
8.
Caravan of Dreams--a sweet job. In the heart of downtown Ft. Worth, this place had 500+ seating for live music where I spent the majority of my time cocktail waitressing for the likes of Rev. Horton Heat, Pantera, Mingo Fishtrap and other local sensations. The middle level had a theater for a regular improv troop as well as a reception/party venue with a terrace and a music room. The top level was a double level rooftop bar with a cactus garden and a waterfall. I met Harrison Ford there. He's quiet. After a tornado in 2001 or so, the Banktower building across the street shed 2 inches of glass all over the rooftop and blew out most of our windows, and the Riata people bought it from the Bass brothers and turned it into a fancy restaurant.
11. Refrigerator factory--one of many summer jobs. Probably the most intense. I was the hottest chick in the plant, simply because I still had all my teeth. I learned early on that it got so damn hot in there that underwear was a deterrent--too much sweat. I moved to graveyard shift after a few weeks of nearly dying of heat exhaustion from 8-3. I slept in my parents' dark, cool basement and they tried to be quiet during the day. There was a hole about the size of a walnut in the wall that I'd watch--when there appeared to be some light coming through that hole, I knew it was nearly time to go home. Sad. Everyone there encouraged me to stay in college, speaking from personal experience.
12. Nuclear power plant--another bullshit summer job. Another girl and I cleaned up in various areas of the plant. One time we entered the male shower area after dutifully knocking and thinking we had the all-cllear, only to come upon a naked man obliviously drying his chest hair under the hand dryer. We made a hasty retreat. It's an image I'm still trying to erase from my mind.
13. Hotel maid--you want pee-low? You want towel? Yeah, that. Lasted 2 weeks at 6.50 an hour, maybe 2 hours a day. Total waste of time. Leah and I did this together while at Northwestern. This was the one job I just never showed up again and never called in. The owner finally called me and asked if I was still working for her....uh...nah.
14.
Rastrelli's--another mom and pop place. They're mostly the same. I always thought it was pretty decent Italian food. Free pizza. Not that bad, for waitressing.
15. Substitute teacher--if you can do this, you can do anything. Trust me. All grades, all subjects.
16. Cheesecake Factory--Cripes. Nazi Germany. This require completely white shoes, a white long-sleeved shirt (which sucked when you have to walk a half hour to work in the Texas heat), white pants and a white apron, which, if it wasn't properly ironed, management would make you clock out and go to the back to iron said apron to get the proper crease. I didn't really try at this job because I was so miserable, so I was lucky to get 100% rating on a secret shopping one Sunday morning. Lots of snobby N. Austin folk.
17. Real teacher--2 years in East Austin. Webb Middle School, 7th and 8th grade English. Made a lot of good friends here, but couldn't see eye to eye with administration in the light of NCLB and the heavy emphasis on TAKS testing. Honestly I probably might've been fired if I hadn't left, it upset me that much.
18.
Alamo Drafthouse--possibly my favorite job, at least in the service industry. Some of the sweetest cash and best shows I've ever seen, and it was fairly easy work. I can't even go into all the good times here, it'd make the post too long.
19. Summer school teacher at a
juvenile detention facility--contrary to logic, this was one of the best teaching experiences I've ever had. About a dozen high school boys, doing time from anything to robbery to rape, sat in my room and talked about literature and poetry for a few hours every day. They wrote some of the most painful and raw texts I've ever read, and were hungry for knowledge. I ate lunch in their cafeteria with them once, and offered a kid my pudding--he refused, citing possible manipulation. I ended up doing a lot of research about juvenile facility education--it's an overlooked and vital area of research. Damn my ADD--I should've done more.
20. Long term sub for a juvenile offender--Shauna spent a month in jail after beating the living shit out of a classmate. I was hired to be her bodyguard/teacher/friend for about 2 months at the end of the school year. Half the time she didn't show up, and about a quarter of the time she'd leave campus, so belligerantly crazy and angry. We did have some good conversations, and I like to think I did help her...
21. Facilitator for UT--this consisted of supervising 25 college student doing their student teacher for 2 semesters. I got the call while teaching for IRD, minus an interview--just a new instructor at UT looking for help, within the same week of being let go from the Alamo (I was out of town the opening weekend of Pirates of the Carribean, thinking I had wrote the thing on the schedule--turns out I hadn't. Boo hoo. So I guess technically I've been fired from 2 jobs.) I got to observe student teachers in kindergarten and elementary classrooms and conference with them and their teachers, trying to make them better teachers. Great job.
22.
Institute of Reading Development--yet another summer job, and a good one, starting with almost 2 weeks of training in Chicago. For 10 weeks in the summer of 2007, I drove to Killeen, Waco, and Corpus Christi to teach reading courses for kids from 4 to older than me. Good fun. I especially liked the nice hotel on the beach they set me up with . Lots of work, but fun.
23.
Summer Institute for the Gifted. Att UT. I taught 4 classes--Pirates Past and Present (seriously!!), Biology, Self-Defense (where my Krav Maga came in handy), and Zoology. More good fun. On the demo night, I used the UTPD dummies to show what my kids in Self-Defense had learned when it comes to kneeing an attacker in the groin, etc, and put a picture of Bush on the head area. FUN.
24. Sylvan--I'm currently at Sylvan as a director of education, so this set me up to know the job in . Tutored math and reading.
25. Director of education at Sylvan. I'm a progress manager for 77 kids currently, have regular progress conferences with their parents and sometimes classroom teachers to best help them, and handle inquiry calls, initial testing, and daily stuff. I love it.
So that's it. What have you done?
